Data: Wait times at area hospitals exceed state average

Eric Besso, Beaumont Enterprise

By Eric Besson

Updated 4:32 pm, Monday, August 11, 2014

FILE - Baptist Hospitals have a regular emergency room, a minor care facility at the hospital and a care facility at HEB Plus. Christus, which already has two hospitals in the area, has two minor care facilities, one in Port Arthur and one in Beaumont. Dave Ryan/The Enterprise
Photo: Dave Ryan, .

FILE - Christus St. Elizabeth and St. Mary unveiled a 4-foot-tall "Healer's Touch" statue on Tuesday, August 13, 2013. This statue was crafted by Zimbabwe artists. The DAISY Foundation gave the hospital the statues to honor the nearly 50 Christus nurses who have received the DAISY Award for their dedication and compassion in nursing.
Photo taken:
Randy Edwards/The Enterprise
Photo: Randy Edwards, Photojournalist

Local hospital administrators marginalized new figures that appear to show their emergency response times lag behind state and national averages, with one saying the metric is an oversimplified and insufficient glance at emergency room quality.

At five area facilities, the average time patients wait in the emergency room for diagnostic tests to be administered exceeds the average of 377 Texas hospitals, according to a recent Texas Tribune database. At four of the hospitals, the wait time exceeds national averages.

The Texas Tribune said it received the numbers from Medicare data compiled and analyzed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Locally, data was provided from The Medical Center of Southeast Texas in Port Arthur, Christus' Beaumont and Jasper facilities and Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas - Beaumont and Orange. Patients at all five hospitals experience wait times longer than the 16-minute average of 377 Texas hospitals.

Christus in Jasper reported the fastest average time of the five hospitals. At 21 minutes, the ER wait is less than the 26-minute average at all applicable U.S. hospitals.

Baptist Hospitals' director of emergency services said the figures are not sufficient to provide a clear look at emergency room operations.

"We don't measure door to diagnostic time," said Kellie DeMary, the ER director. She added that the cited figure takes into account diagnostic exams administered to patients of all severities, lumping "somebody with the sniffles and sneezes" in the same pool with "two stroke patients, a motor vehicle accident and a heart attack across the hall" while ignoring priority levels.

Nearly 84,000 people visited the emergency room at Baptist's Beaumont campus last year, meaning an average of 231 people per day used the 42-bed facility built to accommodate 37,000 annual visits, DeMary said.

Baptist's Beaumont and Orange facilities place greater value on the amount of time it takes to assign severity levels to patients, like those suffering a stroke or heart attack, according to DeMary.

Data on medicare.gov shows 97 percent of the 34 patients who showed stroke symptoms at Baptist Beaumont's ER between Oct. 1, 2012 and Sept. 30, 2013 received brain-scan results within 45 minutes of their arrival, much faster than the 54- and 57 percent respective state and national averages.

Danielle Pardue, marketing and communication director at Christus in Beaumont and Port Arthur, pointed out the Tribune data stemmed from the 2013 fiscal year, which concluded in September.

Last month, Pardue said, Christus in Jasper posted an average time of 10 minutes and the Beaumont trauma center was at 54 minutes.

"Wait times are important to us, obviously, which is why we have the minor care centers," Pardue said.

Christus' minor care facilities, designed to decongest its emergency rooms by focusing on less-severe ailments, are located in Beaumont and Port Arthur.

In July, the average wait times at these facilities were 8 minutes in Beaumont and 11 minutes in Port Arthur, Pardue said.